JAKARTA (TheInsiderStories) - Coordinating Minister for the Economy Darmin Nasution said the government has issued the ninth economic policy package which covers three sectors, namely, electricity, cattle imports and logistics deregulation. The policy packages marked as the first economic deregulation packages issued by the government in 2016.
Darmin Nasution told the press on Wednesday (Jan. 27) that the ninth policy package was aimed at accelerating the development of the power sector to meet consumers needs, the cattle or animal products imports in order to fulfill the pending need for domestic products as well as deregulating logistic sector.
“We want to accelerate the efforts to enhance power production to meet consumers’ needs by speeding up the development of electricity infrastructure,” Darmin Nasution said.
The government has set a program to develop 35,000 MW of power plants within five years of his current tenure. Majority of these power plant projects will be powered by coal and gas and with the remaining power plants will be generated by renewable energies such as hydro power, wind mill, solar, geothermal and others.
There are five main policies covered in the ninth policy package, as far as the electricity sector is concerned. These are: making provision for supporting funds for state-owned electricity firm (PLN), either through state capital participation, continuation of government loans, or through issuance of bonds, loans from financial institutions or through income tax exemption from asset revaluation results.
With regard to the cattle or animal product imports, the policy is aimed at ensuring the availability of meat stock by importing the commodity till the efforts to increase the production of such stock domestically succeed.
“On certain conditions, cattle or other animal products can be imported for a state or a zone which has met the requirements and import procedures, keeping the national interest in view,” the Chief Economic Minister said.
He said the decision to import cattle as the country’s domestic output will not be able to meet growing domestic demand. In 2016, he said, the beef need of Indonesia is projected to reach 2.61 kg per capita, therefore national needs is projected to reach 674,690 tons per annum, or equals to 3.9 million cattle per year.
Meanwhile, domestic production is only projected to reach 2.5 million cattles, thus there will be shortages of 235,160 tons of beef.
With this policy package, and after risk analysis, the Minister of Agriculture will decide the state, zone or animal husbandry businesses, from where the import will be carried out.In the logistics sector, meanwhile, five deregulation policies cover the development of commercial postal service business, unification of port service electronic payment, and establishment of export promotion agency for small and medium-scale businesses through state-owned companies (BUMN).
The government also carried out certain deregulation policies to encourage integrated electronic service system at ports. It has also eased the policy on the use of the rupiah currency for transactions related to transportation.According to Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anung, the government hopes that the ninth economic policy package will help in boosting the economic activities resulting in their faster movement and growth. (*)